University of Virginia Library

It may be expedient to note that the word “kings” is, by a quasi-elliptical figure, necessitated by the concision of expression inseparable from verse-composition, employed in this poem in a general sense, as a comprehensive term denoting, not only the traditional and semifabulous type of the bloodthirsty and heartless monarch of popular legend, but all kinds of egotistical and irresponsible oppressors of humanity, whether aristocratic or plebeian, ancient tyrants or modern exploiters of the Jacobin gospel of Liberty-to-oppress-one's-fellows, Flails of God or political breedbates, slavers or beanbaggers, worldwasters or Trade-union agitators, Philip II or Krüger, Lopez or Lassalle, Gengis Khan or Gambetta, Tiberius or Marat, Attila or O'Connell, Richard of Gloucester or Charles James Fox, Sylla or Moraes, Cromwell or Couthon, Borgia or Barère, Nero or Robespierre. (I confess that, for my part, I can see no moral difference,—except it be in favour of the superior frankness of the Roman ruffian, who, at least, did not claim to benefit humanity by the indulgence of his delirious appetites, —between the frenzied antics of the Imperial corybant, rhapsodizing over the ruins of his capital, and the hyena-orgies celebrated by the obscene cutthroats of the self-styled Comité du Salut Public, the dastardly purveyors of the guillotine, whilst engaged in organizing the cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent victims of the best and worthiest blood of France.) The monarchical tyrant of the legendary type has for centuries past ceased to exist, the last (and imperfect) example having perhaps been offered by Louis XIV, although it must be confessed that the late Prince Bismarck and his “empéreur mécanique” presented many of the characteristic features of the genus. The debonair and soft-hearted rulers of our own days, Franz Josef of Austria, Leopold I of Belgium, Maximilian of Mexico, Ludwig I of Bavaria, Napoleon III, Humbert of Italy, Frederick of Germany, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, &c., men illustrious for all the virtues calculated to adorn a private station and greatly to be pitied for the accident of fate which placed them in a position where their very qualities could not but militate against their security,—can in general be reproached with one sole default, to wit, the lack of the (to a monarch) indispensable capacity of sternness and determination, necessary for the protection, by the unsparing enforcement of justice and discipline, of themselves and their subjects from the irreconcilable enemies of society. Since the monstrous latter-day development (for its origin we must go back to the Garden of Eden or, yet farther into the dark backward of Time, to the birth of those eldest of the passions, greed and envy,) of the shameless and heartless juggle best known by the modern euphemism of “Liberalism” and the forcible inoculation of society with the Radical doctrines of “Ôte-toi de là, que je m'y mette” and “La carrière ouverte aux non-talents,” (notwithstanding the terrible object-lesson of the French Revolution, which demonstrated, once and for all and past all appeal, the radical falsity of the optimistic views of human nature maintained by Rousseau and his fellow-sentimentalists of the hysteric school and proved, with crushing conclusiveness, that the human animal, especially of the inferior ethnical strains, is, when unrestricted by laws and uncurbed by social and religious conventions, a ferocious and heartless wild beast, dangerous and pernicious to the world as to himself, the attempted realization of humanitarian theories and Republican chimeras, although absolutely unhindered and pursued, under exceptionally favourable circumstances, to its logical issue, having resulted in the absolute domination of the criminal classes and the utter ruin of France under the frightful oppression of the Jacobin leaders, men stained with the foulest vices, who would, under any decent system of government, have passed their whole lives in prison,) the equivalent of the old despot-type must be sought in the ranks of the so-called “popular” party, among the cynical and unscrupulous social and political agitators, who, in pursuit of their own private advantage, deliberately address themselves to excite class against class and to exploit, to their own profit, the brute passions and cupidities of the ignorant and gullible masses, upon whom the balance of political power has, by the incredible folly and weakness of their natural guardians and directors, been allowed to devolve; the “sophisticated rhetoricians” and professional humbuggers, the “tonguesters”, who, however carefully they may dissimulate the alliance, are the natural and inevitable abettors and coadjutors of the “knifesters”; the shameless jackpuddings who allow no consideration, public or private, to interfere with the flagrant indulgence of their raging vanity and of whom a fair sample is the crew of malignant busybodies who flood the less reputable portions of the press with their anti-patriotic vapourings and vent their spleen upon the country, which treats them with the well-merited contempt due to those who have an insatiable appetite for notoriety, but are naturally ungifted to achieve reputation by fair means, by heaping the filthiest calumnies on our armies and their commanders and extolling as saints and heroes the bandit hordes of froward and faithless churls, (notable for but one quality, a brute tenacity, an animal hardihood having little in common with the combination of magnanimous virtues, which we in England honour under the name of “courage”,) from whom our soldiers are now (March 1902) proceeding, with the noblest patience and with unexampled magnanimity, to deliver suffering South Africa; brief, among the tribe of fishers in troubled waters, who have, in the service of their own mean ends, extirpated the sense of moral obligation from the minds of the intellectually and morally lower classes (I speak of the wilfully ignoble “smart” class, so-called, at the top, no less than of the far more excusable, because passive and helpless, ethnical residuum at the bottom of the social scale) and have gone far to undermine the moral basis of society, the principle, incomparably formulated by Mazzini, of the performance of duty as the indispensable condition precedent of the enjoyment of any right, which is the necessary foundation of every social fabric. The names of such pests of society, men who have founded their fortunes, social, material and political, upon the ruin and misery of their dupes and the often irreparable injury of their native land, will suggest themselves (alas!) in abundance to all impartial students of contemporary politics and sociology,— names which will, it may safely be prophesied, be held by future generations in at least equal execration with those of the typical tyrants of tradition, as those of heartless and ruthless oppressors of their kind and enemies of humanity, who have brought more widespread ruin upon the world than Napoleon or Gengis Khan and who, by pursuing their private aims under the pretence of philanthropic enthusiasm and of engrossing concern for the welfare of their poorer fellows, have added the crowning sin of hypocrisy to the franker vices of their predecessors.

In allusion to the civil and religious prohibition of suicide, a truly fiendish invention of Semitic origin.